Small group ministry is a wonderful privilege. We're going to examine together nine facets of what it takes to be an effective leader of a small group. I don't really care whether the small group is a service or ministry group, or whether it's a Sunday school class, or whether it's a small home group that meets in a home, or whether it's a group of ladies that meet at a coffee shop, or a group of men that have breakfast together. Anytime a gathering is less than about a dozen people, we really have a small group. And if that group meets because someone's calling it together, then it is an intentionally led small group. 

So the model of ministry that I am going to put before us time after time as we go through these nine facets of an effective volunteer minister, nine facets of an effective small group leader's ministry is going to assume a certain model of ministry, a model in which someone accepts a responsibility for making themselves a value and a blessing to other people who are seeking God and seeking help and seeking comfort and seeking to make something worthwhile out of their lives.

Now you've come because you want to spend some time discussing this very topic. And I want to share with you some of the things that we have learned in hundreds of consultations in churches all across North America. As a consequence of these consultations and hearing the cries of staff members of churches and of lay persons in churches, for a shared ministry in which professional ministers who are well-trained theologically, administratively and lay persons who have their own lives to carry on and, yet, want to be a blessing to show them how to make this sharing possible so that the resources of the theological community are available to the laypersons who want to be a real help to others. 

Now our first facet is going to be on the subject of connecting with the power structure in your church. If you don't connect properly with the authority in your church, you're going to be looked upon as a renegade, as an outlaw perhaps. You're going to be looked upon as somebody who gives the pastoral staff a certain amount of discomfort because they don't know what you're up to over there. And they don't understand that what you're up to may be the most real thing that happens to people outside the actual event of the communion of the morning worship service. You could be one of the most valuable parts of a person's spiritual growth and, yet, the staff of the church might not appreciate that if we don't have that linkage. 

And so, facet number one for the effective volunteer worker is this. You've got to connect to someone in authority on the staff of the church or someone designated by the staff of the church as being in authority, a person who is capable of taking your ministry report so that the staff never has to wonder, "What are you up to?" So step number one is: find someone to report to. You're going to give a report of your ministry.

The purpose of having a ministry through a small group or a Sunday school class is not to be a lone ranger. It's to become a part of the body of Jesus Christ and to contribute health and strength to that body. So our first principle is going to find a ministry supervisor. You have to ask around in some churches because there's not been very much forethought given to this. There's relatively little training in formal management in the average church. The people in the average church staff who have good management skills tend to have acquired them somewhere else besides church and brought them to church. Or they tend to have just a native ability that you'd have to say was a gift of the Holy Spirit in administration. A lot of things that make sense to managerial types simply aren't found in the typical church. And the idea of empowerment - that is working under authority - that's one of the most important definitions of empowerment - working under someone's authority, a legitimate authority - is an important part of your starting your ministry. And it's more important than having your meeting. 

Now in these nine facets that we're going to discuss, the middle facet, number five is actually conducting the meeting. And most of the literature that you can go down to the Christian bookstores and buy or in the catalogs and buy, most of that literature concerns itself with what goes on from minute 1 to minute 59 in a small group or Sunday school class meeting. And the other eight facets, which aren't very well represented in the literature turn out to be far more important to the effectiveness of your group than the actual meeting itself. Because if the other eight are missing or just assumed, then we're going to have hit or miss quality at the small group meeting itself. 

So we start with considering the fact that as a potential leader of a small group or a class, we have to have someone to whom we can legitimately report. And we're going to give this report on a regular basis. We're going to receive feedback on this report. And whether you realize it or not, you can be either an easy person to deal with or a difficult person to deal with for the person in supervision over you.

So my goal in this particular segment is for us to get you to acknowledge the reasonableness of having someone to whom you should report and can report and do report and some idea about what's involved in that so as not to give grief to those who are in authority over you.

Now I'm going to start with this notion - that if you are operating under a legitimate authority, you have a right to ask others to follow you. Because you're not going to mislead them. Because if you started to mislead them, the fact that you're making reports gives the people who are in charge of your ministry an opportunity to shape your ministry in such a way that you don't mislead them. 

One of the difficulties we have found in trying to create a climate for ministry development is this. Many professionally educated people refuse to take roles in the context of the church's volunteer ministry.

And the reason is not that they're not willing to be obedient to God. It's just that they take their ministry very, very seriously, and they don't want to do anything that might harm someone. This is spiritual life we're talking about. We're talking about destiny issues. We're talking about a very, very important part of a person's life, their spirituality. And, “I went to school for years,” a dentist will say, “in order to drill teeth and, yet, you want me to deal with an eternal soul with no training, no backup, no supervision?”

What we find, then, is that supervision compensates for lack of training. Because if the supervision is constant or frequent, then if something starts unraveling, if the ministry starts going south or souring if some portion of what is being done is not helpful to the care of souls, then the persons who are taking the ministry report have a chance to respond to that. And as the reports come in, a correction is possible. And we don't wind up with a sectarian impulse, we don't wind up with a cultish heresy. What we wind up with is people who are gently and lovingly brought to a place of truth by persuasion. Because the group leader has pledged to receive feedback on their ministry as their starting place.

Now as a leader of people actually having a following, you have to ask yourself, "Who's ministry is it?" And you have to take responsibility for that ministry. In other words, you say, "Under God, as a servant of Jesus Christ, I am going to serve my brothers or sisters in the faith by showing care and love toward them and by assembling them together for prayers and for sharing and for a discussion of how the scriptures apply to their lives." 

Now I'm not going to wait until somebody prods me to do it. I'm going to take responsibility for doing it. And then, having taken responsibility for bringing these people together, I'm also going to take responsibility for seeing to it that I'm on the right track as I'm trying to provide leadership to them. So this is a very serious endeavor, and it constitutes a stewardship of the pastoral office. God has given the pastoral office to the churches. But the professional pastors are not numerous enough to meet all the needs that are involved. So those of us who are serving the churches - lay people - if we do not take and make ourselves available to the great shepherd and to his under-shepherds and professional staff, then the amount of love that Christ wants to show in his church will never come to the front. Because we will not have made ourselves available to him.

What does it mean to take responsibility for your group? It means you begin to dream of being a helper to other people's spiritual development. Now we're not talking about Lucy's role in Peanuts, the comic strip, where she is the unsolicited diagnostician of the entire world, and your portion of it, and your personality in particular. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about learning to be genuine encouragers of one another. You see, small group ministry is characterized in the scripture one another mutuality. There's always this notion that we are building up one another. And each person that you build up, or help to build up, or encourage has the potential of turning around and putting something into your life that's every bit as precious and valuable to you as your encouragement is to them. We'll explore that more as we talk about what happens between meetings. But you need to have this dream that says, "I want to be a blessing to someone." And that means you need to set some reasonable faith goals. 

Now here's a faith goal. And it doesn't look like a tall goal until you start to pull it off. "I will, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and under the coaching of the staff, I will become a ministry leader in our congregation such that I can help convene 10 people at a time and pour myself into those people's lives in such a way that those people become fully indictable as committed Christians under my care." In other words, I'm going to have an influence on these people for good such that they will be known to be God's people, and they will begin to think of me as one of God's servants because I helped them become all they could become for Jesus Christ. What a dream, what a goal. 

Now how long does it take to pull that off? Well, that depends on you. I mean, some of you are a piece of work, and you're going to have to have a lot of improvement in order to be able to pull that off, because you'll go out there and say, "I can pull that off," and nobody wants to come to any meeting that you hold. Then you begin to say to yourself, "Is this an issue that I need to consult my hygienist about or what is this? Because there's nobody wanting to come to my meetings." And one of the reasons is that your attractiveness to people is determined a great deal by how you handle yourself. And you may have to learn how to handle yourself differently than you're handling yourself now.

Let's go to the authority thing, and let's ask ourselves then what are some of the elements that are involved in plugging ourselves into the church staff. And I'm going to put a small organizational framework around you so that you can have a little bit of a sense of where you fit in. And then, as you begin to dream to be a blessing to other people, you'll be dreaming, but you'll be doing it with the support of the church's administration.

Of course, churches have boards, councils, and what-have-you. And so here we have a church board. It can be called by many names in different denominations. It might be a board of deacons. You might call it a board of elders. You might call it a board of trustees. But here's a board. And very typically, as churches develop, they designate someone who's going to be the senior pastor. Now in a small church, you'll recognize that the senior pastor may be the only pastor, so to say the senior pastor is a little funny. Senior to whom? Well, to himself. Perhaps no one. 

So senior pastor. And senior pastors in a very large church are typically going to have not only the senior pastor title but they're going to have some staff members. And there might be any number of staff members, but someone will have the office of pastoral care especially as it relates to group life in the church. So whether it's called pastoral care, it means hospital visitation, that's not what I'm talking about here. But this is community pastoral care, which means someone who's seeing to it that the parish life of the church is properly supported organizationally. 

Now under this pastoral care staff person, you might be directly reporting, but most of the time, that only lasts the first year or two of a small group ministry in a church. Your actual reports will typically be made to a volunteer. And this volunteer person, we designate as a coach of small group leaders. And this coach has a limit as to how much span of care the coach can handle as a volunteer. We've learned that coaches that try to handle more than four or five small groups tend to run out of life for space in their lives. And they become overwrought and they can't do the job that they ought to do. And so, we recommend that a coach only thinks of being a coach of only four or five small groups. 

Now if this coach was to gather the several persons around them that they might consider to lead and we were to imagine that number five, then each of the small group leaders that reported to them would-- here's a small group leader, and here's a small group leader, and here's a small group leader. And as the coach takes reports from these five people, the efficiencies of meeting together and taking these reports in a group, that's a very attractive notion. And when these people come together in a group, we call that particular meeting a huddle. And it speaks to the fact that in a ball game out on the field, your various players might come together with their quarterback. Well in this particular case, the huddle is being led by the coach and various players who are leading the small groups or teams around them. And if we were living in an ideal world and there were no accidents on freeways and there were no late nights at work, if there were no sick children, it would be possible to think that the coach's job is a matter of conducting a huddle meeting. And we've learned that that's not the case. 

What we have actually learned is that some percentage of your people get to a huddle meeting. But they all need coaching. And so, whether you do your work as a group or one on one, it still has to be done. You still have to have a touch between the coach and the person giving the ministry report if you're going to have an effective and growing ministry.

Now we have learned that there are a few people who seem to be able to thrive without very much coaching, without very much supervision, without very much support. They're really the minority. Churches that are effective in increasing the number of people under the care of small groups have learned that you can't leave coaching to chance, that you have to say to a coach, "If you're a coach, here's the dream. Touch every one of your people every week. Touch them in some way. And if they don't show up for a huddle meeting,"—because huddle meetings should be held a couple of times a month typically—“then get out there and do a one on one with them to keep them alive until the next huddle meeting.” And if they miss that one, do another one on one. Because it's not their attendance at huddle that counts, it's the quality of nurture and support that they receive. That's what counts. 

And if you're a group leader, you have every reason to expect that your church will arrange its staff and its resources in such a way that you are going to have a senior pastor who is aware of what's going on in the pastoral care department, is going to have assigned a staff member who is able to say, "Yes, this person is an okay coach," and will be able to put you in touch with such a person if you start this ministry so that you can have the confidence that if this person says okay that they are talking to the appropriate authorities and they're helping you make a legitimate contribution to the work of the church.

Now if you want to be most effective in growing and changing your ministry, you need to learn how to cooperate with the coaching process. We've learned that there are good coaching processes and then, there are poor coaching processes. We have learned for example - and you've learned this in your workplace and even raising your own children - you've learned that if you load up on people with anger or spend a lot of time in negativity that the result is a decrease in morale. You've learned that. We learn that in the church the same thing is true. We've learned that the tone of the relationships is very, very important to people's well-being and that coaching needs to be an uplifting and positive thing. And so, I have learned to distinguish between hit-or-miss coaching and skilled coaching. 

Now when you go to the hospital and you have a nurse and doctor team wait on you, it's very comforting for you to know that not only do these people have extensive training but that they have a process of care that they're following that gives them a consistently better result than hit-or-miss caring. 

At the same time, as you come into the church, the values that you place on systematic care at the hospital are not often found in the church setting. Because churches have not spent most of their energy on skilled care issues. They've left that to Mom. Now that worked for the immigrant church because Mom had the kids all to herself most of the week. She rounded them up and brought them to church. Dad made it all possible, but the bulk of that weight fell on Mom. And she was taking care of things.

And the theological community has, for a Millenia, depended on Mom to do the pastoral caring. The deacons took care of the crises, and Mom took care of everything else. But as women went to work, and as family planning began to reduce the size of the family, and as mobility tore families apart, the old reliance on Mom to do all that stuff - all the care stuff - turned out to be an awkward reliance, an inappropriate reliance. Now we're having to be very deliberate about our caring. And when it comes to coaching, we can't just assume the coaching is going to somehow happen. We've got to be very deliberate when it comes to coaching. And we've learned that coaching has seven things for you to keep in mind.

The first and most important element of coaching is it takes being there to coach. Someone has to be with you to coach. If you want to hold a coaching session if you want to take a report from someone, get with them and connect with them. That is connect with them visibly, connect with them audibly, connect with them touch-wise, connect with them sight-wise. Arrange yourself in such a way that you can hear what they have to say and have enough space so they can say it and you can hear them out completely. The coaching requires being present, fully present to a person for a period of time.

And then we've learned that on the front end of the coaching session in the report-taking mode that the coach needs to be a super-affirming person. "Oh, wow," is one of the most important lessons a coach ever learns to say. "Oh, wow," admiringly. "Oh wow," excitedly. Coaches need to learn all the gestures that are appropriate for "Way to go!" Because as they are conveying actively and listening to the person who's taking the report, "You're doing so many things so right, so well," the coach has just a little bit of time during the reconnecting period to take that report and to build that person up and to let them know, "Listen. As your supervisor, as your coach, as the person who takes your ministry report, I am so pleased and so impressed," at the progress you are seeing in this case. And you find something to praise even if they're completely flat. You find something to boost them because there are times when they depend on your carrying them emotionally. 

And then what you do is that as they give their report is you celebrate all the successes that were happening and you restate the values that are being expressed in those successes. "You had 15 people there! There were three newcomers there. That is fantastic. That's the best I have seen in weeks. That is really good work. How did those people come to be there? And if we don't keep opening our groups to new people, we're never going to be the kind of people we ought to be. But you're hospitable. You people came-- the stove broke, the plumbing was out of order, the car died, and you got there and you had three new people. This is phenomenal!"

And you say, "Don't you think that's overdoing it a little?" Well, that depends on whether you want them to grow or not. If you don't want them to grow, be sophisticated and say, "Oh, you had three new people, and you had to overcome the car. Well, I guess that'll teach you next time to fix the car." But what kind of a coach would this be? 

You need people who will mirror back to you your very best intentions and will say to you, "Way to go!" And then, as you have underscored those values because you're naming the things that you like about what they did and why they're doing it, then you can start from looking backward and with enthusiasm, you can start looking forward. "What are we going to do next time?"

And they'll say, "Well, I'll tell you one thing I'm not going to do. I'm not going to do so-and-so. That was a disaster."

You say, "Yeah, I would do less of that too. But what are you going to do to overcome that?" 

And you start looking forward to stating goals and intentions for the next round. "Well, I'd love to have those three people back and three new ones besides that. Hey, that's terrific." What you want that person to do that you're coaching is you want that person to receive a vision of the future that's even better than where they've just been that'll take them just another inch.

I've watched the coaches work with my kids in cross country and track and high jumps and what-have-you. And they don't go out there and raise the bar two feet at a time. They go out there and they raise it an inch or two at a time. And they keep bragging about them and bragging on them. The discus throw just gets a little bit further, then they brag on them some more. And there's a direct relationship between the bragging and the goal-setting in the mind of the kid. Kids don't believe they can throw those javelins the length they throw them. And if you see them out there and they're doing that work, whatever that form is, they want to make that thing go further. And the coaches say, "That was terrific and I was watching your form. A little more energy in the first two seconds of your twirl and you can have that thing another five feet down that,"--

"Do you really think so, Coach?"

"Yeah."

"I wouldn't have thought so." 

The kids come home and say, "Dad, the coach thinks I can throw the thing five feet further." And I noticed that the number was always 5 to 10 feet. It didn't matter what they did, it was 5 to 10 feet further. And guess what? The accomplishment grew with the dream. The accomplishment grew with the imagination. The accomplishment grew with the practice and the feedback.

Now if you want to cooperate with the coaching process, learn to be easy on yourself in the opening phases on a consultation and to be intentional about what you're going to do next time in the closing phases and don't go in and beat yourself up with your coach.

Nothing's harder to do than to take a person who's self-flagellating so much that they're beating themselves to death with all the negative things they have to say about their ministry. And as a consequence, you never get their psychological power base built up to the point that you can get them to accept a compliment that's an honest one - and they ought to all be honest - an affirmation that's an honest one. They won't accept it.

They go, "Oh, no. I've screwed up so badly. You don't understand how bad I did."

"Well, you did pretty bad. That's right." Is that how you want to spend your time?

No. Acknowledge it, but be a good coach-ee and be willing to say, "Yeah, let's do some celebration for successes." Sometimes we need to do that kind of thing, nurture ourselves to the point of strength. 

And early in the coaching process, you don't want people to work on very many issues at once. They got through the first meeting. Nobody left in the middle of it angry. The group didn't split off and go down to the local church in the next town. I mean, hey, this was an accomplishment. We got through a meeting. This is good stuff. And you just work on one thing at a time. Do a little more of, do a little less of. If you're meeting frequently with people, you can settle for very small gains and have superb performance when you get through.

All right. So keep it positive. Shape with intentions toward the future for the next round. And then, personally understand this. When we talk about you being under authority, we talk about you modeling a special form of obedience. We're talking about something that's a biblical value. Because the scriptures caution us not to give grief to our shepherds. The scriptures caution us this. The scriptures caution us to be good followers of people that have been assigned in a spiritual authority over us. It's a biblically valuable thing to do. Not only that, but if we're under submission, we're going to find ourselves in a position because we are willing to take input, because we're willing to take correction, because we're willing to take advice, and because we seek it out, we'll be like that Roman manager that came to Jesus with a sick daughter. Remember? He came to Jesus and he said, "Would you please order my daughter's health in healing? I'm a man under authority, and I have men under authority under me. I know the nature of authority. And this sickness is under your authority, Jesus. Would you please order it out?"

And Jesus said, "I haven't found faith like this in this whole nation of Israel." He said, "Yes. She's healed."

Do you want to become a person of great faith? Then don't be a person of stubborn willfulness. If you want to be a person of great faith, be a person who's under authority. Seek out someone that will take your ministry report, cooperate in the coaching process, be a person who can be mentored, be a joy to those around you.


Modifié le: mercredi 8 juillet 2020, 12:47